What if the METAVERSE fails? Still, good news.
Carles Gómara
Innovation | Digital Transformation | AI | Speaker | Professor. I explain Technology for non-techies. To teach something in a simple way, you must understand it deeply. Demystifying tech is key to push adoption
How many people have walked on the moon?
There have been 12 NASA astronauts. The first was the well-known Neil Armstrong in the year 1969 with the Apollo 11 mission.
Seven years had passed since the moment in which the president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy, in his speech on September 12, 1962, pronounced the famous phrase: “We chose to go to the Moon.”
At that time it seemed an unthinkable challenge, almost impossible. He knew it, and precisely for this reason he chose it. Because it is in the face of great difficulties, in the face of the most unlikely challenges, that we are capable of bringing out the best in ourselves.
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade […], not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept”
And the last person to step on the Moon was astronaut Eugene Cernan during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
No one else has been back in the last 50 years!!!!
Some may think it is a failure.
The reading should be completely different. The start of the space race not only achieved its goal of putting a person on the surface of the Moon, but also led to countless technological discoveries that benefited society in general.
Just to name a few: artificial limbs, scratch-resistant lenses, the insulin pump, improved firefighting equipment, the invention and improvement of solar cells, new and more efficient water filters, wireless headphones, freeze-dried foods, and miniature cameras that needed very little power to run and have come to be the ancestors of our cell phone cameras.
Now, half a century later, we dream of reaching Mars (which is 140 times farther than the Moon), and it will undoubtedly spark another technological revolution.
It is not my intention to compare President JFK to Mark Zuckerberg.
But there is a certain parallelism between the moment when Zuckerberg announced the change of name from Facebook to Meta, and his new strategy toward the Metaverse.?The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together — Connect 2021
The idea of a Metaverse formed by a massive network of virtual worlds, that we can live in a synchronous and persistent way with an unlimited number of users, and that they are also interoperable. It is, for now, a challenge almost as “impossible” as it was to reach the Moon.
And it will also require the combined efforts of many companies and people. Meta will not be able to do it alone. Nor is it their intention, as explained by Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs at Meta (Making the metaverse:?What it is, how it will be built, and why it matters
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It will be necessary to develop new technologies, and we will have to improve many existing ones.
For example, according to Intel, we will need to multiply by 1,000 the computing capacity that we currently have to be able to enjoy high-definition images and generate virtual worlds persistently.
5G technology, combined with Edge infrastructures and Artificial Intelligence (AI), will also play an important role. It will be essential to reduce the latency of communications and have realistic and synchronous sensations while we “live” in the metaverse.
Possibly the Metaverse will be the Killer App that 5G needs.
And especially we are going to see incredible advances in all the technologies within the Immersive Technologies classification. Some we were already able to experience during the ISE congress (www.iseurope.org), which include not only Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MX). If not also, the Mappings, Holograms, Emotional Screens, 3D sound, Essences, Haptic devices, and more. Its image quality will improve, and the weight will be reduced to improve the user experience.
This journey into the Metaverse began long ago.
Meta’s announcement in October 2021 was just a massive public presentation in front of society. The adventure began in 1992 (Neal Stephenson, “Snow Crash”), and many of its technological advances have already arrived:
??Tourism:?Improvement of the tourist experience with Immersive Realities as in the case of Casa Batlló?https://www.casabatllo.es/en/mapping/
??Business and Consumption:?Visyon develops the CUPRA Master Convention in the Metaverse for more than 600 people from 35 countries.?https://visyon360.com/project/cupra
? Industry:?the use of Mixed Reality (MR) is making its way into collaborative work and training, as I was able to experience during the ISE congress thanks to Orange and its use cases with Microsoft Hololens.
? Entertainment: The roller coaster in the Metaverse of Whiplash.es How to concentrate 10,000 square meters of a roller coaster in 2 square meters. Immersive sensation in the wild.?https://meta-chair.com/
And many more we will see in the future. Still, the Metaverse can fail. That ideal Metaverse may never come true.
But so much effort and creativity are already having their results and impact on society.
And as T.S. Eliot:
“It is the journey, not the destination that matters”
Carles Gómara
Founder - Innovating the Future of Work.
2 年Creativity is about accepting your ability to fail by thinking different. However, this same failure pave the infrastructure for more creativity (Hydra effect ??). Metaverse succeed or fail? ??= Innovation will flourish and with it, we hope a better sustainable future Carles Gomara